Learning Without Exact Guidance: Updating Large-Scale High-Resolution Land Cover Maps from Low-Resolution Historical Labels

Abstract

Large-scale high-resolution (HR) land-cover mapping is a vital task to survey the Earth's surface and resolve many challenges facing humanity. However it is still a non-trivial task hindered by complex ground details various landforms and the scarcity of accurate training labels over a wide-span geographic area. In this paper we propose an efficient weakly supervised framework (Paraformer) to guide large-scale HR land-cover mapping with easy-access historical land-cover data of low resolution (LR). Specifically existing land-cover mapping approaches reveal the dominance of CNNs in preserving local ground details but still suffer from insufficient global modeling in various landforms. Therefore we design a parallel CNN-Transformer feature extractor in Paraformer consisting of a downsampling-free CNN branch and a Transformer branch to jointly capture local and global contextual information. Besides facing the spatial mismatch of training data a pseudo-label-assisted training (PLAT) module is adopted to reasonably refine LR labels for weakly supervised semantic segmentation of HR images. Experiments on two large-scale datasets demonstrate the superiority of Paraformer over other state-of-the-art methods for automatically updating HR land-cover maps from LR historical labels.